


Dead, not gone

by Pteryxcat



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Mostly Canon Compliant, Post-Canon Fix-It, canon compliant if you squint, dead but not gone, psychopomps are cool you guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-20
Updated: 2020-02-20
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:22:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22819981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pteryxcat/pseuds/Pteryxcat
Summary: Vax checks up on family after canon
Relationships: Vax'ildan & Vex'ahlia (Critical Role)
Kudos: 60





	Dead, not gone

At 30, at the solstice when the walls of the worlds are thin, Grey Huntress Vex sits beneath the sun tree again, waiting to see if there’s a hunt this year. Instead, a few minutes after the great clock strikes midnight, she feels a presence, like someone’s sitting next to her. She freezes, stock-still.

After a moment, she hears a quiet voice. “Hey stubs.”

She reaches over blindly, expecting nothing, but her hand makes contact with solid leather and feathers. She turns, eyes filling with tears, and strong arms wrap around her shoulders as Vax pulls her into an embrace. 

Eventually, he pulls away, holding Vex at arm’s length. She grabs at him, bleary-eyed. “Don’t go.”

He looks back at her, tear-marks covering his face and beading on his feathers. “I can’t stay. I’m sorry.”

“I miss you.” she says.

“I miss you too. I miss you so much. But hey, look at me, okay?” He tilts her face up. He looks exactly the same, like she does, though his hair is much longer than hers now. She cut hers short a while back, after one too many mirrors.  
“I’m not gone, alright? I can’t be here with you, but I’m not gone. So don’t worry about me! I’m still watching out for you, as much as I can. And I am so, so proud of you, for everything. Look at what you’ve made here!”

Vex sniffs, rubs her eyes. “You’re an uncle, you know. And I’m pregnant again. We’re going to have a huge family, and you can tell the raven queen to stay away until we’re all old and gray, because she can’t take anyone else away from me. She already got you, and I’m not giving her anyone else I care about. Not again.”

Vax starts to speak, but she covers his mouth with her hand. “I know, I know. She’s a goddess, you’re her champion, you’re dead, bargains trades destiny fate. Just. Come back when you can—ewwwww!” She pulls her hand away as he licks it. “Agh, undead saliva, eww.” She glares.

He wiggles his eyebrows and grins, before going solemn again. After a moment, he looks out at the sky. “She’s having me guide souls, did you know? Helping people find their way to their rest, away from necromancers or demons that want to use them. It’s—it’s good. I think she gets lonely, you know? She has a lot of souls to keep safe, and she hasn’t had a champion to help her in a long time.”

He looks back at Vex and smiles, sadly. “I’ll try to visit when I can, but it won’t be like this, probably. I’m only barely here as it is. But I’ll come when I can and watch, even if I can’t show you I’m there. It’ll be alright, okay? And you be sure to collect lots of good stories to tell me. Adventures, laughs, new friends and old, anything. Go out and live a good, long life, saving the world, defeating evil. I’ll be right here when you’re done. But not until then, okay? Don’t do anything too stupid. I need you in one piece to take care of all our family.”

Vex sniffs again, brushes her hair back. “She doesn’t deserve you, you know. But yeah. I won’t do anything, you took all the stupid with you.” Abruptly, she smacks him across the shoulder. “And what’s that about watching me? You’d better not be peeping into my and Percy’s bedroom, you creep.”

Vax yelps. “As if I’d — no-one wants to see that! Ewww you’re my SISTER! I’d never!”

Vex puts up her nose, not quite hiding a smile. “Good, you don’t WANT to know what kind of. Manners. Percy and I get up to in there. We do have children, you know! Or, well, one currently. It’ll be plural in about six months.”

Vax covers his ears, screwing up his eyes. “Augh, no, I didn’t need to hear that. Do you use manners or does he — never mind I don’t want to know. Agh, I’m never going to get that out of my head....”

Vex smirks. “Really, though.” She pulls him close again, expression going sad again. “We all miss you terribly, darling.” 

He sighs. “I miss you too, stubby.” He leans against her, arms around her shoulders.

He’s gone when Vex wakes up in the morning, covered in dew, with no hunt necessary. When she gets back to the castle, she finds a tiny braid in her hair, with a small black feather tucked into it.

At 32, Vex is out in the woods alone, hunting something with just a few too many lucky crits. She falls, bleeding out, light fading... then wakes up, in better shape than she thought, with black feathers around her and the creature nowhere in sight. Later, she wonders if she imagined the voice. “Not yet, stubby.”

At 36, Vex lies in bed exhausted, her newborn twins sleeping on her chest. Through a wash of pain, drifting in and out, she hears soft footsteps, barely there. “They’re beautiful, sister. I’m so proud of you.” She feels a light brush of a kiss against her forehead, then a gust of air like something big taking off. The midwife sitting watch at the bedside says she hadn’t seen anything, but, well. Vax always was a stealthy fuck. Him not being seen doesn’t mean he wasn’t there.

At 40, Vex fights an ancient lich, deep underneath Westruun. Percy by her side looses shot after shot, Keyleth takes down swarms of skeletons, Pike turns undead from atop Grog’s enlarged shoulder, Scanlan throws insults that break down powerful spells. At the final shot, Lich crumbling, its reliquary starts to glow with a sickening yellow light — and then it stops, as space twists black-purple around it and it falls to the ground, dull and inert. 

Vex cries out: in that brief burst of energy she could have sworn she saw her brother, hands around the reliquary, wink at her with a lip-read mutter of “Don’t worry sis, I’ve got it. This one’s long overdue.”

After they’ve double checked to make sure the Lich is really dead, they wonder what happened. A botched spell? A trick? Vex says what she saw, expecting to be disbelieved, only to have everyone go solemn and nodding around her. 

“I’ve seen him too,” Pike offers, “at a resurrection that almost went badly. He was in a shadowy corner like he was waiting, almost completely hidden, but when I pulled the girl back he nodded at me with a smile and disappeared. I thought I’d imagined it.”

At the pub, after, other stories come out. A quickly-moving shadow that distracted Grog’s enemy at a key moment, a whisper in Scanlan’s ear that let him barely avoid capture by a disgruntled crimelord, a raven that often visited Keyleth, a moment in Percy’s workshop late at night where he felt a sudden companionable presence, just as a fiddly bit of tinkering finally clicked into place. All small things, things that could be reasoned away as coincidences, or imagination, or chance. But together, there’s a definite pattern, like someone’s watching, and helping where he can.

He’s busy, doing work for the Mother of Ravens, and far away, and dead, though that never stopped him before. But when he can, when the ways between the worlds are thin, he does his best to let his family know they’re loved.

**Author's Note:**

> So this has been sitting in my WIPs since 2018, when I had A LOT OF FEELS after finishing campaign two. I wrote it before the wedding one-shot, so, slightly non-canonical? Yeah.


End file.
